Last week at a pre-op appointment, I needed to sign a document that read, “I understand that I will not be able to become pregnant if I undergo this procedure,” and my breath caught in my throat and tears stung my eyes.
The next moment, that reaction surprised me. I am 47 years old and I haven’t thought about becoming pregnant in years. I long ago lost the hope of bearing a child and eventually lost the desire as well. But somehow initialing my name next to that sentence compressed the last 20 years, and I was suddenly a young wife again, crying over Dollar Store pregnancy tests that stubbornly refused to show me two pink lines.
The EFCA blog is doing a series on marriage and asked me to write this one.
A guy in college told me that if I wanted to be a missionary in Africa, no one would date me. I didn’t care. And he was wrong.
In fact, it was during college that Gil Medina came into my life, and we got to know each other while co-leading a ministry in a cross-cultural, low-income neighborhood near our church. The two of us became a team before we were even friends. We hit it off and worked well together: he was the visionary, relational guy, and I was the administrative and logistics gal.
I wanted to be more than friends but didn’t think he did, so I barreled along with my plans to move overseas. I was accepted with ReachGlobal, agreed to teach in Tanzania, raised all my support and got a visa.
Meanwhile, Gil wanted to be more than friends too, but kept his mouth shut so as not to get in the way of God’s plan for my life. Finally, some mutual friends helped us break through our self-sacrificing martyrdom and pointed us in the other’s direction. It didn’t take long for us to figure out that, really, we wanted to do this missionary life together.
When we got engaged, we weren’t sure if Tanzania would be as good of a ministry fit for Gil as it was for me and considered serving in a different country. But then a youth sports outreach position opened up in Tanzania, which felt like Gil’s dream job. We got married on October 7, 2000, and nine months later, we were on a plane out of California. We arrived in Tanzania just a year after my original plan to leave. ReachGlobal got two for the price of one and I felt like I had everything I could ever want: I got to serve in Africa, and with my best friend and ministry partner. The Gil and Amy Medina Team couldn’t have been more perfect.
My mom sits at her mom’s breakfast table, wailing and pleading. My grandmother sits opposite her, wailing and angry.
It is one of my earliest memories.
I’d never heard so much emotion out of either of them, and the sunny little room encircled by cabinets of glassware suddenly felt tense, alarming, to my five-year-old soul.
My Gram struggled to accept that we were moving to Africa, so that day at her table was one of many tense conversations. In her anger that my mom was taking away her grandchildren, Gram even consulted a lawyer to see if she could sue for custody.
During our first two-year term in Liberia, we faithfully sent her letters and pictures. My mom tape-recorded my brother’s and my voices and mailed the cassettes off too. Gram didn’t call once during the entire two years. She didn’t send a single letter. Her anger and grief consumed her.
My grandmother never understood my parents’ love for Jesus, so their motivation to become missionaries didn’t make sense to her either. But unfortunately, her response wasn’t all that different from many parents who do share their children’s faith.
In Mobilizing Gen Z, Jolene Erlacher and Katy Whitequote the Future of Missions study from Barna: “Only 35 percent of engaged Christian parents of young adults say they would definitely encourage their child to serve in missions, while 25 percent are not open to the idea at all.”
They continue, “Career success and physical safety are the top concerns. Nearly half said, ‘I’d rather my child get a well-paying job than be a career missionary.’”
This piece assumes you are familiar with the story of Renee Bach, which was recently depicted in the documentary Savior Complex on HBO, but also in the 2020 podcast series called The Missionary.
I have a lot of sympathy for Renee Bach because I could have been her.
I remember questioning whether a college education was worth the price when so many in Africa urgently needed that money and my help. If I had gotten the notion in my idealistic head that it was possible to go to Africa at age 19 and start a charity, I might have jumped on the next plane.
Did Renee Bach have a Savior Complex? Absolutely. So did I. So do a lot of young people. It might not be about missions for all of them – it might be climate change or racial reconciliation or anti-sex trafficking or gender equality or whatever is the current hot-button topic – but young people are known for their passion and idealism. Renee’s intentions were noble, and she helped to save babies’ lives. Isn’t this a good thing? It sure is a lot more inspiring than playing video games in the basement.
But young people don’t know what they don’t know, and this is what the adults in their lives need to help them see. So when I consider Renee’s story, that’s the part that strikes me as the avoidable tragedy.
I’m not sure what was in the water in Jinja, Uganda, that caused dozens of young American women to zip over and start charities all by themselves. (We never saw this trend in Tanzania.) Renee moved to Uganda the same year that Katie Davis published her New York Times bestseller Kisses from Katie about doing the exact thing. Katie was the darling of the evangelical world that year, so why would Renee question if this was a wise move?
Last week, I noticed a verse I underlined 25 years ago – Psalm 139:10. Next to it, I had written “FCC membership 9/97.”
I paused for a few minutes and sat in that memory.
It was my senior year at college, my second year away from home, and Faith Community Church (FCC) quickly became my community. The Sunday night college group at Lance and Suzanne’s became my second home, and I spent my Wednesday nights as an Awana leader for 5th grade girls.
It was Awana that led to my “crisis.” About a year after I started attending FCC, the elders decided that anyone who volunteered in the children’s ministry needed to be a member of the church. This made sense, of course – goodness knows, children’s workers need to be kept accountable, and FCC was ahead of its time.
I couldn’t imagine my life without children’s ministry, especially Awana, as I had been a leader since 8th grade. But in my 20-year-old mind, becoming a member of FCC was out of the question. I felt an unswerving loyalty to the church I had grown up in in San Jose, and I planned to move back there as soon as I had my teaching credential the following year. Attending FCC was just a blip in the history of my life, so how could I take the weighty step of becoming a member?
This felt like a huge dilemma, so much so that I resonated with a Scripture passage about God’s presence in making my bed in the depths. So much of a quandary that I did the very scary and intimidating thing of scheduling a meeting with the children’s pastor. Pastor Jeff was the complete opposite of scary and intimidating, but still – doing a grown-up thing is terrifying when you are 20.
